


A Delayed Reaction

by tripwirealarm



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Introspection, Post-Episode: s04e10 Midnight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-08
Updated: 2014-05-08
Packaged: 2018-01-24 01:31:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1586717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tripwirealarm/pseuds/tripwirealarm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Being a bystander is anathema to his nature.  He’s not a victim or a hero. Grand or small, every calamity can trace its impeccable lineage back to the Doctor.  He is the prime ancestor of misfortune.  Forefather of disaster.  He can still taste the thing’s words in his mouth."</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Delayed Reaction

Donna is sympathetic, he knows, but she doesn’t  _understand_.  Not really.

Fifteen feet of high-prism fenito glass to cull the xtonic rays is still fifteen feet too close to this planet and everything on it.  Too close to the light and the shadows of it, too close to the cold and the dark and the diamond cliffs of oblivion, too close to the vaporized bones of two dead women somewhere in that airless boil of diatomic-carbon vapor and galvanic radiation.

It’s what some might call a personality flaw of his.  Always thinking what he could have done, should have done—but never thinking he’d make himself a villain in his own story with his arrogance.

Driver Joe.  Claude, with engine grime under his nails.  The Hostess without a name tag.  Mrs. Sky Silvestry, recently single.  

Recently deceased.

“Go on,” he’d told Driver Joe, after steamrolling in with psychic paper and a silver tongue, some rubbish about being an engine expert that wasn’t entirely a lie.  Pressing him to open the visor on the Crusader vessel because  _he_ had wanted to see, manipulating him by half-insulting his caution, he’d said, “ _Live a little_.”

Here, where it’s quiet inside the Leisure Palace, beside a pool less impressive than shattering sapphires but still gem-bright with the filtered toxic sunlight of an x-type neutron star sustained by degeneracy pressure alone, he sits.  

He waits for Donna.  Sits, and stares and thinks of the shadow.

A shadow seen by Claude, the mechanic. A young man in coveralls and smelling of silicone engine lubricant.   He’d seen something dark, shifting in the poison light.  And the timing of it all only strikes him now, in the silence and light with Donna dressing in the spa powder room while he itches and shifts, sits and stares and buckles slowly under the increasing weight of what feels more and more like guilt.

There had been so many Crusader vessels since the installation of the Leisure Palace, detoured forty clicks west or not, and never a single accident on the planet Midnight until the Doctor goads a driver to open the window-visor and a mechanic sees a shadow. A primeval darkness waiting in the galvanic non-visible light.

A flash-evolving sentience that can only speak after it hears.  Perhaps some kind of signal had attracted it, some sort of unseen broadcast, an electromagnetic pulse that could tamper with the mag-lev polarity thrust to stall the engine.  But then they’d opened the screen.  And the Doctor understands the interaction of forces far too well to believe in happenstance.

Why wouldn’t it be that it only had form after being given form by the eyes of others the way it was only given voice by appropriation?  A being of observation.  Of perception.  The Big Bad Wolf wearing grandmother’s nightgown with big ears and eyes, her voice coming from behind teeth like a fence of knives.

_The better to eat you with, my dear._

First it’s seen, then it sees.  It’s spoken to, and it speaks.  

They’d opened the visor for him.  He’d spoken to it.  And then—

Nine hundred years and he’s only now realizing it’s always him.  That he makes it happen.  Pompeii.  Agatha Christie’s disappearance.  The reign of Harold Saxon made possible only by deposing the architect of Britain’s golden age and leaving an open wound vulnerable to the Master’s infection.

Being a bystander is anathema to his nature.  He’s not a victim or a hero. Grand or small, every calamity can trace its impeccable lineage back to the Doctor.  He is the prime ancestor of misfortune.  Forefather of disaster.  He can still taste the thing’s words in his mouth.  

Oh yes.  A villain in his own story.

Call it a delayed reaction.  It’s hours before he’s sick with it in the silence of his own bed chamber, pushing his palms against the globes of his eyes until patterns emerge under pressure.  It’s a trick of the optic nerve generating a synthesis of the interstellar medium: a universe contained behind his eyelids.  He dreams of beach sand and paper crowns and better days now behind him.

For the first time in months, he sleeps, time waits and the monitor in the dark console room sputters with static.  A face emerges like something rising from the surface of water.  Its beloved mouth forms a word, a title, it shouts soundless as a thing with no voice to steal but this time, there is no one to see it—no eyes to grant it reality—and it fades back into the digital blizzard of the lost signal, unseen.  


End file.
